I Will Not Die Anonymous

Two things came to mind recently.  First, that as someone 62, whose mother lived to be almost 94, I am now in the last third of my life.  I don't want to waste it.  I don't want to coast.  I want to make my mark.

And this has been compounded by the fact that one of the publications that I edit for a living is about end-of-life issues.  What spooks me when I'm working on this publication isn't reading about all the physical suffering that terminal patients endure, but about the existential suffering, or at the very least, the existential thought processes, that they undergo.

So this subject is front and center all the time.

So I have shifted the focus slightly.  I still love to sing, and I will continue to learn oratorio and opera arias and scenes until this is no longer physically possible, but the focus has shifted from trying to be noticed for my singing, to trying to be noticed for my story.  Surely some journalist, professor, psychologist, or voice teacher with a public platform might be interested in the phenomenon of someone my age who is obsessed with perfecting her craft as a solo classical singer.  Or some young Lesbian who wants to know the how and why of my abandoning my dream of singing long ago, when I found it incompatible with being a Lesbian-Feminist pioneer (although if I was ever a real feminist then pigs can fly - I simply wanted the approval of my lover and our friends).

So rather than fruitlessly going to auditions (I still keep my ear to the ground, but will not go back and audition for any of the groups I auditioned for before, except two that gave me a decent reception) I am going to post comments to various blogs and link them back to this one.  I try to keep the comments concise and not whiney, but I also try to keep them honest.

So last week I posted a comment on the blog of a woman who wrote a New York Times opinion piece about being bisexual (I mentioned deciding I was bisexual after falling in love with the Mentor, mostly because I wanted someone in my life who was stronger and younger).  Neither she nor anyone else commented on it, but I got one hit to this blog from hers. Then a few days ago I posted a question to a blog post on a major music site.  (I don't want to link it back here, because I used a pseudonym that I have used for a variety of things, some of which I am not 100% proud of, but that pseudonym is so "me" that I will never change it.)  In any event, the woman who writes the blog posted, although she did not answer, my comment, and I got at least one hit back here from  her site.  Another point of interest is that a neighbor of mine who is a music critic also has a blog on that site.  He is quite pleasant but has never ever referred to my singing or even acknowledged that this is a big part of my life, despite it being such a big part of his.  You have no idea how much that smarts.  And his wife, a former voice and piano major at one of the big conservatories who is in a totally different career now, has the snootiness that all conservatory graduates have, however well they sang or didn't (I have never really heard her sing).

I have vowed to be less timid.  There probably isn't much I can do about performance nerves (aka "sustained singing above a G nerves") but I can stop feeling "not entitled".  I feel "not entitled" to love the spotlight.  I think it's unseemly,  I think I'm not entitled to admit to myself that my main reason for singing with this choir is to get solo opportunities and that when I sing church solos I am every bit as much the diva as when I sing opera solos, I just am playing a different character so I wear a different costume and use different facial expressions and gestures.  To stop worrying that if I post a comment to someone's blog about who I am and where I'm at with singing (or anything else) people will laugh at me.  So what?

In other news, I went over some of the Werther with my teacher. He said he thinks I sing the "Letter Scene" better than anything else he has ever heard, mainly because it is in a comfortable range: from middle C to G at the top of the staff.  Of course I got tired in the middle of the big monologue with the high As and now they have become another fence to balk at, but he said I should work on it, and as it's early days yet, I can decide whether I want to sing it or whether I want to end the scene with "Va" and do something else.  He thinks I should order the score of Hamlet.

Regarding church, the choir is singing something from Mendelssohn's Elijah, so I asked the choir director if I could sing "O Rest in the Lord" that day at communion and he said yes. That would be for the 9 am service and he said I might be able to sing it at communion at 11 also.  Apparently there are not a lot of empty anthem spots because the church has replaced the defunct Praise Choir with a children's choir and a youth choir.

And the violinist and I will coordinate a date to do something together.  There aren't that many Sundays left to the choir season so maybe we can do "Laudamus te" in the summer.  Even just having one or two choir solos on my calender makes me feel a little more optimistic.